(Music — “The Kids Are Alright” by The Who.) The last time I saw Terry? It was before I got tested, before anyone knew about the virus. Before all these people said to me, “You’re lucky it’s not AIDS, then you’d have to take medicine your whole life.”
We went together for four months, I think. From November to March because we broke up right after Denise’s birthday. We didn’t break up, really, so much as decide that maybe we should see other people, that we shouldn’t get serious. Terry was weird to talk to. I never knew what he was thinking. I knew a little bit about him. He was retired and he’d had some kind of office job. I found out that he hadn’t had a rotten childhood, he just hadn’t liked it. He said he didn’t have many friends and he was too serious before. Interview: Why did you break if off?
EMMA: We weren’t in sync. He liked all that Boomer music, rock and roll and Frank Sinatra and stuff. And we couldn’t exactly fall in love, because he was so different.
He was always nice to me afterwards. He wasn’t one of those guys who just ignores you.
We were all hanging out at the park next to the library after school. It was the end of the year, school was almost over. Kamar was hanging out with Brenda. He wasn’t exactly her boyfriend because she was also hanging out with this other guy named Anthony and one weekend she’d be with Kamar and the next weekend she’d be with Anthony.
Everybody was talking and something Terry said made DC really mad. I don’t know what it was. It really surprised me because DC always acted like
Terry didn’t even exist. When Terry was around, he’d ignore him. When he wasn’t around, DC would hang with Kamar. But DC started screaming, stuff like, why don’t you have any friends! You loser! You fucking loser! You have to hang around with us because you don’t have any friends! Well we don’t want you, either! So why don’t you just go die!
Terry had this funny look on his face.
A couple of guys pulled DC away and calmed him down. But everyone was looking at Terry, like it was his fault. I don’t know why, I mean, he didn’t do anything.
That evening I was supposed to stay at Denise’s house, for real, not like when I told my mom I would be at Denise’s and then went out. So I took my stuff over to her house, and then my brother, who was home from Duke, took us and dropped us off at Pizza Hut so we could get something to eat and then we wandered over to the steps outside the CVS because we saw people hanging out there.
Lindsey was there and she told me that DC was looking for Terry. That DC said he was going to kill Terry. Kamar got arrested, she said. Which meant that there was nobody to calm down DC.
Kamar had gotten arrested before, for shoplifting, but he got probation. But this time he got arrested for possession. Partly it was because Kamar is black.
Everybody was talking about Kamar getting busted and DC going off the deep end.
Lindsey kept saying, “Oh my God.” It really got on my nerves. I mean, I knew DC hated Terry. DC just hated Terry. He said Terry was a poser and was just using people.
Interview: Were you friends with DC?
EMMA: I knew DC, but we never really talked, but Lindsey had been seeing him for a couple of months so she knew him better than Denise and me.
Lindsey thought DC and Kamar were really friends. I thought Kamar just hung around with DC because he had money. Kamar was something like three years older than DC. But Lindsey said Kamar was just using Terry, but he and DC were really close.
I don’t know what was true.
After a while Terry showed up. I didn’t know what we should do, if we should tell him or not, but finally I thought I should. Terry was sitting with his car door open, talking to some people.
I told him Kamar got arrested for possession.
He wanted to know what happened, and I didn’t know anything but what Lindsey had told me.
Terry wanted to know if he had a lawyer.
I never thought about a lawyer. Like I said before, mostly it was easy to forget that Terry wasn’t just a kid like everyone else.
Terry called the police station on his cellphone. Just punched up the information and called. He said, he was a friend of Kamar Wilson’s. They wouldn’t tell him anything on the phone, so he hung up and said he was going to go down.
I felt really weird suddenly talking to him, because he sounded so much like an adult. But I told him DC was looking for him.
“Fuck DC,” Terry said.
I thought Terry would take off right then and there to go to the police station. But he kept talking to people about Kamar and about what might have happened, so I gave up and I went back to sit on the steps with Denise and Lindsey. We were working on our tans because it would make us look more Egyptian and Indian. Not that I would even think of doing that now, even though skin cancer isn’t one of the types of cancer.
So finally DC came walking from over towards the hardware store and Denise saw him and said, “Oh shit.”
I just sat there because Terry was an adult and he could just deal with it, I figured. I’d tried to tell him. And I was kind of pissed at him, too, I don’t know why.
DC started shouting that Terry was a loser.
I don’t remember if anybody said anything, but Terry didn’t get out of the car. So DC came up and kicked the car, really hard. That didn’t do anything so he jumped up on the hood.
Terry told him to get off the car, but DC wanted him to get out of the car and talk to him. After a while Terry got out of the car and DC said something like, “I’m going to kill you, man.”
DC had a knife.
Denise wanted us to go inside the CVS. But we were pretty far away. And the people inside the CVS are creeps anyway. They were calling the police, right then. Terry stood right by the door of his car, kind of half in and half out.
Lindsey was going, “Oh my God. Oh my God.” She was really getting on my nerves.
I didn’t think anything was really going to happen.
Terry kept saying stuff like, “Calm down, man.”
DC was ranting and raving that Terry thought that just because he was older he could do anything he wanted.
Terry finally got in his car and closed the door.
But DC didn’t get off the hood. He jumped up and down on it and the hood made this funny kind of splintery noise.
Terry must have gotten mad, he drove the car forward, like, gunned it, and DC fell off, really hard.
Terry stopped to see if DC was okay. He got out of his car and DC was lying there on his side, kind of curled up. Terry bent over DC and DC said something…I couldn’t see because Terry was between me and DC, Matt was one of the kids up there and he said that Terry pulled open his jacket and he had a gun. He took the gun out in his hand, and showed it to DC and said to fuck off. A bunch of kids saw it. Matt said that Terry called DC a fucking rich kid.
Interview: Have you ever seen a gun?
EMMA: I saw one at a party once. This kid I didn’t know had it. He was showing it to everyone. I thought he was a creep.
Interview: When did you see Terry next?
EMMA: I never saw Terry after that, although I told the clinic about him, so I’m sure they contacted him. He was where the disease came from.
I wasn’t the only one to have sex with him. Brenda had sex with him, and this girl I don’t know very well, JaneAnne. JaneAnne had sex with some other people, and I had sex with my boyfriend after that. I don’t know about Brenda.
JaneAnne and Brenda’s interviews. JaneAnne was interviewed from her home in Georgetown, MD, where her family moved six months ago. Brenda is still living in Charlotte with her mother.
It taught me something. Adults are different. I don’t know if I want to be one.
Interview: Why not?
EMMA: Because DC was acting stupid, you know? But DC was a kid. And Terry really wasn’t, no matter how bad he wanted to be. So why would he do that to a kid?
Interview: So it was Terry’s fault?
EMMA: Not his fault, not exactly. But he wa
s putting himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Interview: Should he have known better?
EMMA: Yeah. No, I mean, he couldn’t know better. It was my fault in a way. Because most of the time if, like, we’re at the bowling alley and a couple of geezers come in trying to be young, we just ignore them and they just ignore us. It’s just instinct or something. If I hadn’t talked to Terry, none of this would have happened.
Terry has different rules than us. I’m not saying kids don’t hurt each other. But Terry was always thinking, you know?
Interview: What do you mean?
EMMA: I don’t know. Just that he was always thinking. Even when he wasn’t supposed to be, even when he was mad, he was always thinking.
(Music — “Solitude” by Duke Ellington.)
EMMA: When my parents found out they were really shocked. It’s like they were in complete denial. My dad cried. It was scary.
We’re closer now. We still don’t talk about a lot of things, though. We’re just not that kind of family.
Interview: Do you still go to parties? Still drink?
EMMA: No, I don’t party like I used to. When I was getting the antivirals, I was so sick, I just stopped hanging out. My parents got me a PDA with a minder, like Denise’s. But I wasn’t doing anything anymore. Lindsey still sees everyone. She tells me what’s going on. But it feels different, now. I don’t want to be an adult. That must have been what Terry felt like. Funny, to think I’m like him.
(Music — “My Old School” by Steely Dan.)
* * *
Isabel of the Fall
IAN R. MACLEOD
Here’s another dazzling story by Ian R. MacLeod, whose “New Light on the Drake Equation” appears in the beginning of this anthology. In it, he takes us to a rich and evocative far future, strange and numinous as the stuff of legend, for a tragic story of forbidden love, transgression, and a terrifying fall from grace.
Once, in the time which was always long ago, there lived a girl. She was called Isabel and — in some versions of this tale, you will hear of the beauty of her eyes, the sigh of her hair, the falling of her gaze which was like the dark glitter of a thousand wells, but Isabel wasn’t like that. In other tellings, you will learn that her mouth stuck out like a seapug’s, that she had a voice like the dawn-shriek of a geelie. But that wasn’t Isabel, either. Isabel was plain. Her hair was brown, and so, probably, were her eyes, although that fact remains forever unrecorded. She was of medium height for the women who then lived. She walked without stoop or any obvious deformity, and she was of less than average wisdom. Isabel was unbeautiful and unintelligent, but she was also un-stupid and un-ugly. Amid all the many faces of the races and species which populate these many universes, hers was one of the last you would ever notice.
Isabel was born and died in Ghezirah, the great City of Islands which lies at the meeting of all the Ten Thousand and One Worlds. Ghezirah was different then, and in the time which was always long ago, it is often said that the animals routinely conversed, gods walked the night and fountains filled with ghosts. But, for Isabel, this was the time of the end of the War of the Lilies.
Her origins are obscure. She may have been a child of one of the beggars who, then as now, seek alms amid the great crystal concourses. She may have been daughter of one of the priestess soldiers who fought for their Church. She may even have been the lost daughter of some great matriarch, as is often the way in these tales. All that is certain is that, when Isabel was born in Ghezirah, the many uneasy alliances which always bind the Churches had boiled into war. There were also more men then, and many of them were warriors, so it is it even possible that Isabel was born as a result of rape rather than conscious decision. Isabel never knew. All that she ever remembered, in the earliest of the fragmentary records which are attributed to her, is the swarming of a vast crowd, things broken underfoot, and the swoop and blast overhead of what might have been some kind of military aircraft. In this atmosphere of panic and danger, she was one moment holding onto a hand. Next, the sky seemed to ignite, and the hand slipped from hers.
Many people died or went mad in the War of the Lilies. Ghezirah itself was badly damaged, although the city measures things by its own times and priorities, and soon set about the process of healing its many islands which lace to form the glittering web which circles the star called Sabil. Life, just as it always must, went on, and light still flashed from minaret to minaret each morning with the cries of the Dawn-Singers, even if many of the beauties of which they sang now lay ruined beneath. The Churches, too, had to heal themselves, and seek new acolytes after many deaths and betrayals. Here, tottering amid the smoking rubble, too young to fend for herself, was plain Isabel. It must have been one of the rare times in her life that she was noticed, that day when she was taken away with many others to join the depleted ranks of the Dawn Church.
The Dawn Church has its own island in Ghezirah, called Jitera, and Isabel may have been trained there in the simpler crafts of bringing light and darkness, although it is more likely that she would have attended a small local academy, and been set to the crude manual tasks of rebuilding one of the many minarets which had been destroyed, perhaps hauling a wheelbarrow or wielding a trowel. Still, amid the destruction that the War of the Lilies had visited on Ghezirah, every Church knew that to destroy the minarets which bore dawn across the skies would have been an act beyond folly. Thus, of all the Churches, that of the Dawn had probably suffered least, and could afford to be generous. Perhaps that was the reason that Isabel, for all her simple looks and lack of gifts, was apprenticed to become a Dawn-Singer as she grew towards womanhood. Or perhaps, as is still sometimes the way, she rose to such heights because no one had thought to notice her.
Always, first and foremost in the Dawn Church, there is the cleaning of mirrors: the great reflectors which gather Sabil’s light far above Ghezirah’s sheltering skies, and those below; the silver dishes of the great minarets which dwarf all but the highest mountains; the many, many lesser ones which bear light across the entire city each morning with the cries of the Dawn-Singers. But there is much else which the apprentices of the Dawn Church must study. There is the behaviour of the light itself, and the effects of lenses; also the many ways in which Sabil’s light must be filtered before it can safely reach flesh and eyes, either alien or human. Then there are the mechanisms which govern the turning of all these mirrors, and the hidden engines which drive them. And there is the study of Sabil herself, who waxes and wanes even though her glare seems unchanging. Ghezirah, even at the recent end of the War of Lilies, was a place of endless summer and tropic warmth, where the flowers never wilted, the trees kept their leaves for a lifetime, and the exact time when day and night would flood over the city with the cries of the Dawn-Bringers was decreed in the chapels of the Dawn Church by the spinning of an atomic clock. But, in the work of the young apprentices who tended the minarets, first and always, there was the cleaning of the mirrors.
Isabel’s lot was a hard one, but not unpleasant. Although she had already risen far in her Church, there were still many others like her. Each evening, after prayers and night-breakfast, and the study of the photon or the prism, Isabel and her fellow apprentices scattered to ascend the spiral stairs of their designated local minaret. Some would oil the many pistons and flywheels within, or perhaps tend to the needs of the Dawn-Singer herself, but most clambered on until they met the windy space where what probably seemed like the whole of Ghezirah lay spread glittering beneath them, curving upwards into the night. There, all through the dark hours until the giant reflectors far above them inched again towards Sabil, Isabel pulled doeskin pouches over her hands and feet, unfolded rags, wrung out sponges, unwound ropes and harnesses, and saw with all the other apprentices to polishing the mirrors. Isabel must have done well, or at least not badly. Some of her friends fell from her minaret, leaving stripes of blood across the sharp edge of the lower planes which she herself had to clean. Others were banished back to their
begging bowls. But, for the few remaining, the path ahead was to become a Dawn-Singer.
To this day, the ceremonies of induction of this and every other Church remain mostly secret. But now, if she hadn’t done so before, Isabel would have travelled by tunnel or shuttle to the Dawn Church’s island of Jerita, and touched the small heat of the clock which bore the unchanging day and night of eternal summer to all Ghezirah. There would have been songs of praise and sadness as she was presented to the senior acolytes of her Church. Then, after they had heard the whisper of deeper secrets, Isabel’s fellow apprentices were all ritually blinded. Whatever the Eye of Sabil is, it must filter much of the star’s power until just enough rays of a certain type remain to destroy vision, yet leave the eyes seemingly undamaged. The apprentices of the Dawn Church all actively seek this moment as a glimpse into the gaze of the Almighty, and it is hard to imagine how Isabel managed to avoid it. Perhaps she simply closed her eyes. More likely, she was forgotten in the crowd.
Thus Isabel, whose eyes were of a colour that remains forever unrecorded, became a Dawn-Singer, although she was not blind, and — somehow — she was able to survive this new phase of her life undetected. She probably never imagined that she was unique. Being Isabel, and not entirely stupid, but certainly not bright, she probably gave the matter little deep thought. In this new world of the blind, where touch and taste and sound and mouse-like scurryings of new apprentices were all that mattered, Isabel, with all her limited gifts, soon discovered the trick of learning how not to see.
She was given tutelage of a minaret on the island of Nashir, where the Floating Ocean hangs as a blue jewel up on the rising horizon. Nashir is a beautiful island, and a great seat of learning, but it was and is essentially a backwater. Isabel’s minaret was small, too, bringing day and night to a cedar valley of considerable beauty but no particular significance save the fact that to the west it overlooked the rosestone outer walls of the Cathedral of the Word. Before dawn as she lay in her high room, Isabel would hear laughter and the rumble of footsteps as her mirror-polishing apprentices finished their duties, and would allow a few more privileged ones to pretend to imagine they had woken her with their entrance, and then help her with her ablutions and prayers. Always, she gazed through them. Almost always now, she saw literally nothing. She thought of these girls as sounds, names, scents, differing footsteps and touches. Borne up with their help onto her platform where, even atop this small minaret, the sense of air and space swam all around her, Isabel was strapped to her crucifix in solemn darkness, and heard the drip-tick of the modem which received the beat of Jerita’s atomic clock, and sensed the clean, clear waiting of the freshly-polished mirrors around and above her as, with final whispers and blessings, the apprentices departed to their quarters down by the river, where, lulled by birdsong, they would sleep through most of the daylight their mistress would soon bring.
Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19 Page 79
